The pattern of creating ‘multiscreen systems’ from multiple standalone electronic devices is emerging. Mobile electronic devices such as mobile tablets, smart phones, portable and wearable computers or the like can be used as a paired display and/or a control panel for other networked electronic devices.
Known multi-device multi-screen applications range from media sharing, remote command and control or simple standalone cooperating applications where a target device having a display is arranged to execute an action upon reading a message shared by a source device. For clarity, a user having a source device networked with a target device interacts with the user interface of said source device that is arranged to share a message with the target device and where upon receiving said message the target device executes an action with effects on the target device that, as a consequence, updates the user interface of the target device.
For example, a user has a source device such as a smartphone arranged with a print submitter application showing a user interface on the smartphone display. The application may be arranged to submit upon user interaction a print job or document with settings by means of a message with details about said print job or document to a printer device that, upon receiving the details will print automatically said print job or document with the settings.
The problem perceived by the user willing to interact with a target device using a source device is that, although he has visual access to both the source and the target displays he can hardly deduce beforehand what are the effects on the target device of the user interaction performed on the source device. Interpreting these effects in advance requires cognitive effort since users need to mentally match the information shown on the display of the target device to his interaction on the screen of the source device. Further, when the user interface displayed on the target device is too complex or incomplete the user may have difficulties in identifying the relations or may be unable to identify them. Further, in case said effects have consequent undesired results users need to know about said effects in advance before interacting with the source device so that the effects on the target device can be avoided.
In a first example, a user willing to print a large print job with hundreds of documents having specific print settings would like to know in advance which documents cannot be printed due to various reasons such as missing media type or size, insufficient ink or due to other conditions that may not be met. Although the user has access to the printer display panel he will have to perform an educated guess requiring a high cognitive effort about potential printing problems specific to his current intent that is printing the print job. Further, although the ink level and loaded media type and size may be shown on the printer display panel the user may be unable to mentally infer printing problems.
In a second example, a user inspecting a print queue shown on a printer display may have difficulties in identifying his jobs especially when the jobs list is long and comprise jobs from other users or, when the information shown is hard to interpret as such.
Hence, what is needed is a mechanism that will aid the user in combining the information shown on a display of a source device with the information shown on a display of a target device.
Some attempts of techniques relating to multi-screen systems made of standalone devices having displays are focusing on solving the problem of collaborative interactive work between two users having different devices showing the same or similar user interface. Thus, although said attempts concern the same kind of systems, the problem to solve and solution are different.
Some other attempts of techniques relating to a user observing multi-screen device are focusing on solving the problem of showing alternative views with different details. Although these techniques focus on the needs of a user viewing a multi-screen system, the system is not constituted of multiple devices and the problem as well as the solution are different.
It is an object of the present invention to provide an automatic method, a system and a target device arranged for helping a user to visualize relationships between a source view displayed on a display of a source device and a target view displayed on a display of a target device and, by doing so, to simplify the cognitive effort of a user of the source and target device.